I feel like I’ve been neglecting Mazzy lately. What with all the mom porn and the Snooki onesies and the air purifying innuendos, I’ve forgotten that this is ultimately a blog documenting my daughter.
I stopped keeping a baby book a long time ago and with that I stopped recording a lot of the little moments. Like when exactly Mazzy said her first word or the first phrase she strung together. (It might have been “Oh. My. God.” after she dropped a book behind the dresser, but I’m not sure if that came before or after “Hi, Barry”— that’s our doorman, who for the record, still doesn’t know Mazzy’s name.)
Mazzy’s got a pretty large vocabulary at this point. Her sentences get longer all the time. Today, when I left for work, Mazzy asked if I was going to the store.
“Why? Do you want something?”
She thought really hard. I know this because her eyes go wide and she “ummmmms” dramatically.
“Ummmm…. Ummmmm…. Ummm… You buy apples?… And chocolate?”
The kid is smart. She threw apples in there first to throw me off her main agenda.
But the most precious words that come out of Mazzy’s mouth, are actually the ones she gets wrong.
I know I should be correcting her, but ALMONDS are so much cuter when they are mispronounced as SALMONS. And saying DIAPERS like DI-PEARS makes Mazzy sound adorably French.
Mike and I now say both SALMONS and DI-PEARS just to ensure she never gets them right.
A few days ago Mazzy said the word DELCIOUS which made me sad because up until that moment, she had been mispronouncing it as MELICIOUS. I think it came from me saying, “Yummm… delicious” and Mazzy bridged the two.
She also butchers MICKEY MOUSE.
Minnie was actually one of her first words because someone gave her a plush Minnie when she was born. But the first time she saw Mickey Mouse was at the Disney Store a few months ago, when she met the life-sized version of the famous couple for a photo op.
Excitedly, she screamed— “IT’S MAMA MINNIE AND DADA MINNIE!!!”
Swoon.
Mazzy is now familiar with Mickey Mouse but has to make an effort to get his name. She pronounces it as MUCK-EE and hits the ‘K’ extra hard.
“It’s Minnie Mouse and MUCK-EE Mouse!”
He is a rodent, after all.
Pluto doesn’t get off easy either. His name is PUDU. I haven’t even attempted to correct her. It’s too damn cute.
Sadly, every day Mazzy’s vocabulary gets better and her pronunciation more accurate. It has become clear that the only way to combat boringly impeccable speech, is to give her larger words.
“Look! It’s a heliocopter!” I’ll say.
“A heliocopter!” she’ll repeat perfectly, to my disappointment.
“The heliocopter is flying next to the Empire State Building.”
“The Empire State Building!”
“The Empire State Building is an excellent piece of art deco architecture.”
“Excellent art deco architecture!”
DAMN. The girl is too good.
But then today, I introduced her to WAFFLES for the first time.
“MAFFLES?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”
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What’s your favorite word that your kid mispronounces?
Please keep telling your adorable Mazzy stories! and Maffles are pretty melicious!
I love mispronounced words. We have fugs (frogs), mucks (ducks) and bankyous (thank yous) around here. It’s too cute.
My children are older now, 13,11 & 8 but we still use the word hanitizer in our house instead of hand sanitizer. We also ask “who are they versing? If asking about which two teams are playing one another.
For a long time my boys were into Pokemon (they still like it but can read/speak better) and instead of saying that one of the Pokemon were evolving they would pronounce it EvolVATING and I never could correct them.
Joycelyn
Now imagine that in a BILINGUAL kid =D It’s WONDERful! I’ve stopped correcting her because she will one day get abada(araba=car) and teshekrel (teshekkurler=thanks) right and then I’ll miss her mispronounced turkish learning days.
I love butchered words! Carson calls a Garbage Truck a Bargy Wuck. He’s slowly turning Wuck into Truck, but it’s a lot less fun.
I love little mispronounciations!!! Right now, we have mumkey for monkey and orangin for orange. My oldest used to call Goofy Pooky and Epcot Apricot. I have to admit being completely sad when Natalie pronounces something correctly.
I guess to make up for it, we are getting really convoluted stories from her that jump all around. And she likes to tell her big sister to “Don’t tell me no, just say okay” and to “Do that again, and you get a time out!”
We taught her a song to help learn the letters in her name, but I forgot to think about the fact that she can now spell her name. She can’t be old enough for that yet! She’s still my little baby!
We don’t have any mispronouciations yet, but when Aubrey sees a dog, she growls at it. I have no idea why, she also woofs at them but the growling is hilarious!
We have a lot but my favorite is “lellow” for “yellow”. Drives her older brother insane but I keep stopping him from correcting her.
There are definitely certain things Caitlyn pronounces wrong, but I get a bigger kick out of how seriously she takes context. For example, my husband refers to the dog as “asshole” all the time and I swear Caitlyn said asshole 30 times a day for 6 months (you know, every time the dog walked past her). She has only recently started calling him by his actual name. And in our house, Mickey Mouse is hot dog. On Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, they end the show with the “hot dog dance”, and so we can not convince her that his name is anything besides hot dog. She will call Minnie by her name, she refers to Donald and Daisy as duck, but Mickey is still hot dog. It’s hilarious.
I’m also finding it very novel that she’s starting to speak in Spanish. She has the perfect little accent and it’s fucking adorable.
At our house we have an uppy and a catty for puppy and kitty. So cute, we hear them about 100 times per day (each time the dog or cat are seen) and i love it each time. Actually anything with 4 legs is an uppy; the alligator on tv – an uppy – makes even an alligator sound cute!
P.S. I love this blog – I am in Lincoln Nebraska and its the first thing i check when i get to work in the morning. Thanks for sharing!
Nupty=empty, chicken=kitchen, love you=lahdoo. Oh, and firecracker= . . . use your imagination.
Oh how much fun we have with mispronunciation! My two year old calls his sisters by the wrong names, and one of them stuck. Lilia is “E-yuh” and Lacey is “Sessy” (and that one stuck. All of us call her Sessy now). But he too is a huge fan of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. For the longest time it was Mick Mouse but he eventually got it right. Some of his other words are:
Goofy = Doofy
Pluto = Dudo
Chocolate = Chocwit
Climb = Cwime
Get down please = Up peese
But what I love the most is his sentences… he still struggles with the filler words and insists on the use of certain big kid words. My favorite sentence?
“Mom, uh tink, uh uh poops, uh uh panties.” Which if translated correctly would be: “Mom, I stink. I have poop in my diaper.” Which he tells me every time and follows up with “ummon” (“Come on!”)and walks to his room to lay down and be changed…
My son calls the Cars character Lightening McQueen, “Lightening The Queen.” So now my husband and I do too. We hope he never figures it out.
By far our favorite was when our now almost 5 year old called her bottom her “bobbin”.
The Yankees are hoping to make it to the World Serious.
I too love the misprounouced words and encourage them when I can…oh they will learn the right way soon enough enjoy the younger years. My son who is 2 and really just now starting to talk calls Bananas are Bings, Turkeys are EEEssssss, and my not too favorite but still way cute is I am mombar…a combination of Momma and his babysitter Barbar. The one thing he says that just kills us each time is anytime anyone sneezes, coughs, burps or makes any noise there as he says in the most cutest voice ever “excuse me”
I remember my mother-in-law correcting my then 15 month old for calling it a “baba” “It’s a boT-Tle”-ugh. They aren’t going to go to college saying the baby words and it’s such a brief period we still enjoy using some of them to this day. And they are 5 & 8 so very few mispronunciations happen now…..Here are a few of our faves: joy-joys=Cheerios, ahdocado=avocado, occopus=octopus, napkim/napkume=napkin (each girl had a different pronunciation of that word). So enjoy and encourage the “mistakes” they go away too fast!
I like the way she sings the alphabet. She always starts with “Now I know” and it’s pretty much “Now I know my ABCDEFE…URS, TVWXYE. Now I know ABE…” and so forth. She can say individual letters, though.
For the longest time my daughter pronounced sausage as “awe shit.” I didn’t want to correct her but couldn’t have her ordering it in restaurants.
I’m an au pair for bilingual children. My 3 year old confuses the meanings of everything and nothing. So when I catch her getting into something and ask her what she’s doing she always says “Everything!”. I love it 🙂
We have a lot of mispronounced words in our house, which is totally adorable. But my favorite is the word the baby has come up with for our very loud, siamese cat. Since the cat is always wailing when the kids are trying to go to sleep, we are constantly shushing him. So now, my son calls all cats “SSSSSHHHHHHHH!”
holy cutest pictures. she’s a pleasure! my lil man is only 5 1/2 months old, but i’m sure my sentiments will be the same by the time he is talking 🙂
My two year old calls our dog Sophie “She-She” and calls yogurt “RoRo” – two of my favorites. 🙂
Oh this brings back memories…. My baby isnt so much a baby any more. She’s 6 now but i love it when she calls Coca Pebbles cereal- the brown cereal or tell me she wants to go to crabs (red lobster) for dinner. She use to sing jingle bells funny but for the life for me I cant remeber how it went now 🙁
Sam hasn’t got his R’s L’s or Th’s in. So entire sentences are fun with him. We sadly have him in speech therapy. Sadly, he is progressing speedily. Because I want him to overuse the letter W forever. It’s so bloody CUTE!!
My favorite is actually not MY daughter’s… it’s my niece. She has a bad case of plumber’s crack. So she goes around telling everyone (when they have the same misfortune) “I can see your butt-track.”
Before I had children I was a nanny for a family in Atlanta. It was pride weekend and as we walked to the park we passed a house with a front porch full of people celebrating Gay Pride and flying two proud rainbow flags. To my horror the little boy I was watching pointed to the flags and screamed FLAG!(but with out the “L”). Everyone was silent for a moment, and I tuned to the little boy and said “That’s right,Frank,FLAGS!” and everyone started laughing and screaming FLAGS FLAGS! Thanks god for everyone’s sense of humor!
Vivian pronounces ‘medicine’ as ‘mecimine’ (Meh-see-min), bananas are ‘bee-nanas’, and strawberries are ‘strawbabies’. All of which I find utterly adorable and never want her to stop.
I love the made-up words. Around here we have a complutu (computer) and we love to watch Pussin (as in Puss in Boots). We have matotos (tomatoes) on our sandwiches and botatos (potatoes)with dinner. But the best is the lipitatu (thermometer). Still can’t figure out the origin there but who cares, it’s adorable!
I once posted a long facebook status update listing all the big new words my little girl was getting adorably wrong (yeah, my facebook friends LOVE stuff like that, I’m sure), but now I can hardly remember any of them. 🙁 I’ll have to go look for it.
I do remember “hostipal,” “ambliance” for “ambulance” (she still says this one!), and “enviborate” for “vibrate.”
My Superman is almost 9 now, but we had many gems.
Puppy Dodd, Stwirrel, Incredible Hulk was The Terrible Hulk, Lighting McQueen was Heightening MtTween, Batman and ro-BINN. I also had a niece that had an occasional French accent: Powder was pow-DEUR.
I almost teared up (and my husband, luckily, thought it was sweet) when I realized the other day that my 4 year old, Ezra, now actually says “yellow” instead of LEL-LOW. Of course, when my husband and I play trivial pursuit and drink wine after the kids are in bed (sad, maybe, but true), both our favorite category is history – and we both say LEL-LOW every single time. I suppose it will just become a part of our family vocabulary… but it was WAY cuter when Ezra used to do it. Next up, he will learn “your” and I will cry a bit then.
It was a sad day when my daughter stopped calling her best friend “Charles” in favor of her real name, Charlotte.
I used to love giving Alyssa little yellow balloons just to hear her say, “Yiddo yeddo bayoon!”
My nephew used to call blueberries “boobies”
Rebecca doesn’t have anything quite as funny, but she did say “bum-bee” for bumble-bee which was friggin adorable… and my best friend is trying to teach her to say “Lets go Mets” and “David Wright”
Oh, this post tugs on my heart, because Anna is doing the same thing. She used to say “Ha Morning!” instead of “Good Morning!” and now that’s all Mike and I can say to each other. She calls the refrigerator the “fridge-a-frator” and I love it. Isn’t it funny how we get so excited for them to start talking and then want them to stay the same forever??
My heart just exploded, your daughter is GORGEOUS!!!
right now, the boys are saying lots of things the correct way…but I will always love the way Jacob says “Yellow”
Lellow….swoon.
it is so cute and them losing that “baby way” of saying it just means they are growing up too fast for me. *sigh*
if this is a duplicate , just delete it, but I wanted to comment.
your daughter is GORGEOUS , I think my heart just exploded!
and while my sons are saying things the right way more often than not lately, I will always love the way Jacob says “Yellow”…”Lellow” 😉
for every time they lose the baby speak, I feel them growing up and away from me much too quickly.
*sigh*
I have no idea why, but Jackson used to point to Dora and call her “blort”. We never watched the show, but the yogurt cups had her picture on them and he decided she was blort, so we called her that for a long time.
The first time we tried to get him to say “helicopter” he said “hopadopter” and NO ONE could keep a straight face.
Her sister’s name. She does it on purpose which took us awhile to realize and makes it that much cuter. I thought for the longest time that she really couldn’t say it, then was thinking along the same lines as you “umm, if she can say super-long words in correct context, why is she having problems with a two-syllable one?” (especially considering her new favourite word is SuperCaliFragilisticExpiAlidocious!!). Then thought maybe it was the “K” sound she couldn’t do – but realized she could say every other word starting with a “K” sound. So then broke it down to the syllables for her – she repeated them perfectly – and close together – then broke back into “her” word for her sister – followed up by a cheeky grin and huge hug. Which would be wonderful and one we would likely encourage as a nickname for our eldest – if it didn’t sound exactly like “Da-da”!!! Which in a way is even funnier when she yells it out in public then runs to her sister while every adult is looking for her father! lol!!
Oh, and I also love how she says “thirsty” for drink and “hungry” for food. “Mommy, I want my thirsty! I want some hungry!” 🙂 And one more thing – my eldest spoke very clearly from a very early age. I love love love the learning to speak mixing up words/sounds phase sooooo much and am soooo glad I got a chance to experience it!! Yes, it is good when they don’t grow up TOO fast …
My daughter used to refer to her thumb as her scum and when she asked for more water juice (we drink water with a splash of juice around here) as war juice. That might just have been her throwing the Jersey accent in though.
DANG I miss that stage.
Since my kids are 14 and 12, it would just be sad if they said maffles.
Probably.
Yeah, it’s such a cute phase! Ella calls Pluto Kluto, even though I keep correcting her. Also still says blutterfly and purkle (for purple) which I do not correct cause I love it!
Hehe, so cute!! I love toddler speak. We have two cats; one named Caramel and one named Kahlua. (I named them before I became a Mommy.) My two-year-old son calls them Care-mell and Ku-da-dah. Which is probably better anyway. I don’t think it would be good for him to go to school saying “I love Kahlua.”
When he wants your opinion, my nephew says “how do you think of my drawing?” instead of “what do you think of…” I love it. I have adopted the phrase, too!
oh, those mispronunciations are the cutest. my daughter is in Kindergarten, almost 6, so her vocabulary is clearing up quite a bit 🙁 I’ll never forget that she used to call her bunny “munny” and one day (before learning to appreciate this) I tried correcting her and said, “BBunny.” She looked at me and said, “Yeah, Munny.” That was the moment that I learned never to correct her again. It was way too precious, and she WAS pronouncing them correctly, I just didn’t know it.
Others:
Lemonade: lemolade – still says this 🙂
Sleeping Beauty: Sleepeen Boodee
Octopus: Aposauce
and so many more that I can’t remember anymore 🙁
My sister couldn’t pronounce N’s when she was a baby, so I was “ikki” until my 3 year old self was reduced to tears. She calls me Sissy to this day. She also had a pillow that she called “bobble” and the entire family corrected her, thinking that she thought it was a bottle. I finally explained to them that the pillow’s name was Bobble. No babies yet to have my own stories 🙁
Socute! My toddler was wanting to write our name (aka scribble) but because we “colour” not “write” she asked ” what colour is your name?” 🙂
The twins say “ba-zurt” instead of “dessert.” Sounds so much more fun as ba-zurt.
Roo had this thing, not only mispronunciation, also a funny phrase. For a while, when we asked him where anything was—matchbox car or IRL school bus—he’d reply “In my pocket.” Pah-kit.
Noah faithfully asks for “Mancakes” every saturday for breakfast. Lasagne has gone through a range of pronunciations – From “Narnia” to “Ba-Narnia” (my fav) then to “Buzz-narnia” and now it’s boring ol’ “bazania”
He also likes “heavy fuffins.” Fuffin is muffin but I don’t know why he calls them heavy.
I never want him to learn them correctly.
Noah calls Chicken “kitchen” too!
My two year old calls everything with fur “kitty!”…even the giant racoons he chased off the sidewalk before I could catch him. Those are NOT cute kitties! Stay away!!
It’s hard to explain “orange” mispronunciations then they ask for a bite of your organs in public.
Okay, I’ll take orangin anyday! lol
I thought of another one last night!
Natalie kept saying she wanted to play with her ola. We kept asking her what she meant and she was getting so angry that we weren’t getting her ola.
We finally told her to go get it and show us what she wanted to play with and she came out with a toy cash register that has Dora on it. We were a little confused until she turned it on. The first thing out of Dora’s mouth? Hola!
Like Joycelyn above, we also use a lot of hanitizer around here, since my daughter conjunction-ized (is too a word) it for years. One of my other favorites was oh-pa-meal for oatmeal.
Oh how I love mispronounced words! My son who is 16mo tries to say everything we say; our little parrot repeats the end of every sentence we utter.
By far my favorite is his pronunciation of Balloons. He loves them and every time he sees one, in a very loud, enthusiastic voice he announces “BABOON!” Now I just can’t help but say “Baboon” too…I think he’s teaching US!
He also recently called my brother-in-law’s black and white cat “Moos” since it looks like a cow. He knows it’s a cat (points and says “CAT!”) but has named it “Moos”….now we all call the cat Moos! So cute!
I adore when kids start talking, the words always crack me up and it’s genuinely entertaining and sweet.
Mazagine = magazine. We prefer to read mazagines around here.
Tabub = bathtub
Shofun = lotion, I always reach for the shofun then think hahaha good thing no one can hear me calling it that!
Spoongobby = spaghetti, no clue lol
Smawties = Smarties, my son’s favorite candies
Yeyyow = yellow. Granddaughter always sleeps with her yeyyow bwankie.
Bompa = grampa
Mite = Midnight(my dog), she was “Mite” from then on.
Be-next-to = next to, not a clue why and we never corrected him or allowed anyone else to do it.
All these words are standard English in our homes now, lol, due to kids and grandkids.
Had a four year old this week tell me all about an illustrator who came into their room at school and messed it up, then later “illustrator” became stranger”. Finally learned that the word was leprechaun and somehow it must have come from a book. I was so confused lol I had to ask the teacher.
But I mostly treasure the numerous different pronunciations of my name…not a kid ever has been able to do it right but I don’t care… I have been Dordy, Dorfy, Dodie, Dorsey, Dorrie, Dortee, and many more. I love them all!!
When my 13 year old grandson wants something from me now, he calls me his throwback name (in a wheedling tone)….Ma’am-a (sounds like gramma but cuter). Awww way to melt the old lady!
My babies are 24 and 22 now, and in our family we still say “all-vos” (olives) and buh-too-nana (banana, long story), but my all-time favorite mispronunciation is “Em-uh-nee Uh-neesa-beesa (Emily Elizabeth, Clifford the Big Red Dog’s owner). My son at age four had practically no articulation, had been in speech therapy for a year and a half and had just discovered the SSSS sound. He was in love with a sound and he put it everywhere!
Fun fact: The hot dog song at the end of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is written by They Might Be Giants.
A little girl calling a dog an asshole is just too funny.
Glad you like the blog! My sister (Dr. B) once did a post about how babies identify things in broad categories at first. So they might think everything pink is a pig or all four-legged animals are dogs.
Aw, I love this! My two-year-old is also starting to improve his pronunciation so I don’t get the cute words as much anymore. That said, he still has a few: he calls “remote” (like remote control) “merote” and he says “rec-triangle” for rectangle.
hilarious!
My son’s learning the months and it’s so cute when he skips the months with more than 2 syllables. He loves AH-PRIL, JOOOON, AH-GIST, brmeereEMBER. Quite impressive I think!
I never imagined running across another Mazzy! We’ve been calling my 15 year old daughter Mazzy since she first began talking because when she started pronouncing her name, Madison, it came out Mazzy. Fourteen years later, we still call her that. This is such an appropriate time to discover this blog since it has to do with kids’ mispronunciations!
Your Mazzy is beyond adorable!
We say lemolade too!
My 4 yr old nephew called Gary the snail(Spongebob’s snail) “Gary the stale” and the WiiU game Splatoon “Spatoon”.
Actually he calls them Gay the sail and Patspoon. My son changed them for fun and told me he submitted the post when I wasn’t looking, and I didn’t check it until now
“New Hamster” = New Hampshire
“Lie berry” = Library
“Dumb f*ck” = Dump truck
“CP Frito” = C3PO
“F*ck” = Fork
“F*cks” = Fox
“Pencil” = Pretzel
My kids said those too!
[…] Ilana author of mommyshorts.com compiled butchered words from all the comments on her blog post “Maffles are Melicious”. Seeing those mispronounced words by toddlers made me laugh and then I remember the show […]